His name wasn’t Christopher Columbus
It was Cristóbal Colón.
He didn’t discover America
Generally speaking, when they came upon places unknown to them, European explorers saw themselves as being the first to discover it, which was almost never the case. If you still want to make a case for a European explorer being the discoverer of the New World, it would be Leif Erikson, the Norse explorer who set foot on continental America 500 years earlier. Erikson couldn’t have discovered it either, though, because the Americas had already been populated for tens of thousands of years, making the Europeans more like tourists than explorers.
He wasn’t looking for new lands
Colón was looking for a shortcut to the silks, spices, and opiates of Asia, opened to the European world by Marco Polo’s Silk Road trade routes 200 years earlier. Back in those days, what Europeans thought to be Asia was actually India. The 4,000-mile long chain of islands in the Indian Ocean were called the Indies, the world’s largest island. They became the East Indies only after someone figured out the Caribbean islands were the West Indies.
He got lost
Because Colón’s navigation calculations were based upon guesswork and spotty data, he made a conversion mistake that led him to overestimate the size of Asia and underestimate the size of the earth. Thus, the distance he thought he needed to travel to get to the Indies was only one quarter of its actual distance. Therefore, the place where he landed must be part of the many Indies islands. Colón never accepted the fact he had stumbled upon the fringes of a new land mass.
He believed he proved that the world was much thinner than everyone thought
Colón insisted to the very end that he had found a new passage to India and said he had proved it by concluding the earth was not round, but shaped like a pear.
Like many others, he believed there was one Great Sea that stretched from Europe to Asia
In those days, it was believed that Europe, Africa, and Asia were a single landmass surrounded by a Great Ocean that covered the rest of the globe. Therefore the place where he landed must be the Indies, and its people, the Indians. Colón’s voyage lasted four weeks, a surprisingly short trip from the west coast of Spain to what he thought was the east coast of Asia.
He never set foot on the North American continent
Colón made it only as far as the Caribbean Sea, landing first in one of the 700 islands in the Bahamas. Hair-splitting scholars argue about which one. No matter what the island’s original name was, it was changed to San Salvador (Saint Savior) because the voyage was funded by Spanish Catholics.
Colón made three more voyages to the West Indies, none of them reaching the east coast of North America, either. Instead, Colón landed on Cuba, Haiti, the eastern coast of Central America (possibly Honduras) and the northern coast of South America (probably Venezuela), but never North America.
He was a slave trader
Slavery had been going on around the world since 300 BC, but Colón is the first known European slave trader. Ten years before his famous voyage, Colón was already engaged in the slave trade in Europe. He saw slaves as commodities to be bought, sold, and exploited. The entries in Colón’s log on the day he landed in the Indies tell us how he felt about these Indians:
“Well-built, with good bodies and handsome features … They would make fine servants … They willingly traded everything they owned for our trifles … They have no iron, they do not bear arms, and they do not know of them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” (Emphasis mine)
European explorations were funded to find and capture riches from faraway places
The most important commodity explorers sought was gold. When it wasn’t found lying around everywhere just waiting to be picked up, some explorers decided the next best thing was to deal in the second-most valuable commodity — human slaves. Europeans set about capturing and enslaving dark-skinned natives from all across the Caribbean.
National Geographic tells us disease, enslavement, and murder took the lives of most of these newly discovered “Indians”
The Tainos and Lucayan people lived within the Caribbean Sea’s 90,000 square miles along with the Caribs and the Arawaks. None had never encountered the influenza, pneumonia, malaria, measles, typhus, and smallpox germs the Europeans brought along with their people, animals, and plants. Lacking immune system defenses for these strange diseases, natives died by the hundreds of thousands in the place that is now called Haiti.
Most were forced to work as slaves on island sugar cane plantations and treated to brutality and extreme violence. The Columbus Education Project says Colón was never a slave trader. Take your pick.
Most people think they know the names of Christopher Colón’s ships
Most people know only one, the Santa Maria, which the Christian Science Monitor calls La Gallega. The Nina? Its actual name was the Santa Clara, which the sailors’ nicknamed for the Spanish word for little girl.
Bowdlerized sources say the origin of the Pinta is unknown, but others say that it comes from the word pintada, slang for a painted one (prostitute). Next time you hear someone recite the names we were taught since childhood, tell them Colón’s ships were named the Little Girl, the Prostitute, and the Saint Mary. Surely someone can make something sinister of that.
He lost his grip on reality
Colón wrote in his Book of Prophecies that all his voyages had been directed by God himself. Colón believed that the world was coming to an end and he was the one making it happen.
Bonus
By 1492, there was nothing left in North America to “discover.” The prevailing theory is that the first inhabitants of North America came across the land bridge from Siberia 10,000 years ago to live in Canada, America, and Mexico. Surely one or two of them had noticed the Mississippi River before Hernando de Soto, the explorer who “discovered” the Big Muddy Waters.* In DeSoto County, Mississippi, you can view barges on the river and Arkansas beyond it from the Hernando DeSoto River Park.
Nowadays history has been revised to add a large handful of asterisks to the De Soto discovery claim
Today we’re told that De Soto was “one of the first known European explorers to document coming upon the Mississippi River.” De Soto looked at the river from the bluffs just below Memphis, Tennessee and the land beyond, which hundreds of years later we know as Arkansas. Today Interstate 40 crosses the Mississippi River on the Hernando de Soto Bridge between Memphis, Tennessee and West Memphis, Arkansas.
Likewise, Spanish Conquistador (Conqueror) Vasco Núñez de Balboa, credited with discovering the Pacific Ocean, is no more than the first European to see it from its eastern shores. Everyone in coastal east Asia had known about the Pacific Ocean for ages, and Polynesians had been living on islands in the Pacific for thousands of years.
Some localities in the United States have decreed alternatives to Columbus Day to honor the original inhabitants of the islands where the explorer landed
In California, the cities of Berkeley, Sebastopol and Santa Cruz have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. South Dakota renamed the holiday Native American Day, and Alabama celebrates a combination Columbus Day and American Indian Heritage Day. Hawaii calls it Discovery Day to commemorate the arrival of Polynesian settlers. In the United States. Columbus Day is October 12th.
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*Muddy Waters is the stage name adopted by the legendary Mississippi bluesman McKinley Morganfield. T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters were the first big-time blues acts to switch from acoustic guitars to electric guitars with amplifiers, mixing blues with country and gospel, inventing rhythm and blues, which became rock and roll. Here’s a live video of Muddy Waters closing his set at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960.
